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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22576003">it shall not be death</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl'>TolkienGirl</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Quests, Sleeping Beauty Elements, Spells &amp; Enchantments, Templar Knight themes, Uneasy Allies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 10:54:56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,630</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22576003</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey of the Jedi Knights is sent with her sword and Holy Fire, to destroy a palace of thorns.</p><p>It doesn't quite go as planned.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>79</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>For one is both and both are one in love: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>it shall not be death</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/gifts">englishable</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There was a red cross emblazoned on her cuirass. There was a halfmoon-mark on the crease of her elbow. The red cross belonged to the Jedi, who had claimed themselves for holiness.</p><p>A dozen years ago, they had claimed an orphan girl, too. No one had ever been able to tell her to what or to whom the half-moon belonged. If the Jedi had heard of others born with marks, they did not speak about them.</p><p>Rey was her name, and she had been riding for six days. This, she knew because she had divided her bread and meat and her precious gooseberries into eleven portions. That was enough to reach the river (and a little more besides). Rey had nearly starved, when she was small. She knew better than to tempt the Great God by careless planning.</p><p>Six days—she had done well for herself. The road was a grey ribbon until its end was sheared by the forest. The trees of the Immortal Forest were so tall that Rey had to tilt her face almost skyward to see their sun-gilded tips, even at a distance of a league. There was not a smidgen of sunlight at the roots; shadows lay there, coiled like serpents.</p><p>Swordmaster Luke had told her that there <em>were</em> serpents, as thick around as a man’s waist, in the old parts of the world.</p><p>She would not be frightened. She called the shadows, shadows; she called the sun, the sun. She called the Great God walking the heavens by His Holy Name.</p><p>And as she rode, she whistled.</p><p>There were no bards on the high-roads. Songs called robbers. Rey learned anew the truth of <em>that</em> when her whistling brought out two or three ragged men with sharp swords and sharp teeth, scurrying from behind the ghostly cairns that marked the miles and the dead.</p><p>Rey raised her sword, and beneath her, her russet steed reared. “Come no closer!” she cried. “I am sworn to the service of the Great God, and only harm those who demand it.”</p><p>They ran. This was something that an orphan girl could never learn to expect; fear in the faces of those who saw her. She was used to being underestimated. She was used to desperate thieves.</p><p>She had whistled anyway.</p><p>When they ran, she felt, inexplicably, lonely.</p><p> </p><p>To a girl whom the desert had raised and razed by turns, the forest was an eternal mystery. She knew her back was to the south, because the wind on her face was as cold as witch’s breath. Rey and her russet steed passed under the eaves of the trees, and she ordered her heart to keep pace.</p><p> </p><p><em>Go to the very heart of the Immortal Trees</em>, the new Swordmaster had said. Master Luke was gone; Lady Leia had retired in the west to live out her latter days overseeing the orphanages and widow-houses by the seashore. Some of the best warriors would come from there, Rey knew. She wondered if children plucked from the sand of the white beaches would be any different than desert rats.</p><p>Any different in their loneliness.</p><p><em>Go to the very heart of the Immortal Trees</em>. <em>There you will find a palace of thorns.</em></p><p>
  
</p><p>The sun went down behind her. In the forest, there were no thieves, no friends, no silences. She might as well have been climbing through the lungs of the earth. There were fronds of moss like wizard’s beards, and trees that laced their fingers together, and air as thick as wine.</p><p>Here was the danger: chittering insects as large as one’s hands, green light that came from nowhere in particular, strange birds that wheeled and dove, and a beast twice the size of her horse charging towards her at full speed.</p><p>Rey had a sword. Of course she had a sword. She was trained in three styles of effective combat; one ceremonial, one on horseback, one on foot. All could turn lethal at the split of a hair. But the air was—perhaps it <em>was</em> enchanted, for she allowed her steed to rear beneath her, allowed herself to be thrown into the wine-dense wind.</p><p>Her sword clattered uselessly to the ground.</p><p> </p><p>When the beast died, it screamed so long that the air itself seemed to change.</p><p> </p><p>His armor was black; the rough-finished steel swallowing light rather than reflecting it. Perhaps it was not steel at all. His sword was, though; a long and keen and cruel thing. It gleamed red where it had struck at the heart of the beast.</p><p>“Who are you?” Rey demanded, finding her voice and her feet and her weapon. She clenched the last tightly in her hand, because she feared that she might drop it again.</p><p>The black knight said nothing.</p><p>“Answer me!”</p><p>“Most would offer thanks.” From beneath his black armet, his voice was muffled. Muffled, yet deep.</p><p>“Not I,” Rey retorted. She hated the smell of blood, and the beast—the beast hadn’t reached her. “It might have meant no harm, but you—you—”</p><p>He stumped forward (even his boots were ironclad) and poked the tip of his blade beneath the creature’s bristled lip. Drawn back, it revealed teeth as long as fingers, dagger-sharp. “Do not look for gentle things, Jedi. Not here.”</p><p>The crease of Rey's arm burned. She must have scratched it, in her fall. She wore leather braces rather than gauntlets, and the crook of her elbow was (maybe foolishly) unprotected.</p><p>“I’m not looking for gentle things.” She ground her teeth. “Very well, thank you. And God be w’ye, and such.”</p><p>He did not laugh. He did not speak again, for a moment. Then he stooped to clean his blade on the beast’s hoary hide.  </p><p>It occurred to Rey that he might be a beast, too. One she would have to fight, no matter how the forest lulled her into stillness.</p><p>“I will leave you now,” Rey said. Carefully, she added, “In peace.”</p><p>“No,” said the knight.</p><p>“No?” Rey shifted, ever-so-slightly, into the third stance of her art.</p><p>He shrugged, clanking. “We are traveling the same way.”</p><p>“Not together.”</p><p>“Why not?” Still toneless, half-smothered.</p><p>“For one thing, you haven’t a horse,” Rey told him crisply. She seized Babette’s reins and jerked her back. Her flanks were foaming from the fright of their near-miss; Rey would have to ride carefully. She mounted as swiftly as she could and urged the mare on, a few paces ahead of where their sinister savior stood. The carcass was between them now.</p><p>He had no wit to offer in reply. Rey tapped her heels and Babette leapt forward. The insects had shuttered their noisy wings for the night; the wind had fallen to a low hum.</p><p> </p><p>When she found the river, she knew someone had lied to her.</p><p>It burbled and rushed, silver with moonlight she could not see. The light rested on it like a cloud, and the scent of it was knife-sharp with sweetness.</p><p>Rey, settled at its edge, decided that it was not safe to take water from it. Who knew that anyone who drank it might not sleep for a thousand years, thinking only a few hours? She had two full waterskins left, anyway, and a third half-full.</p><p><em>Let nothing stop you</em>, the swordmaster had said.</p><p>She removed her cuirass, and her braces, and rolled up her sleeve. The moon-mark was angry, red.</p><p>It looked like it did in her dreams.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>In her dreams, there is:</em>
</p><p>
  <em>A blood-moon. A boy.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Pain on the boy’s white face, night in his dark hair, a mark on his arm that matches hers.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>“There is a bridge barely a furlong away.”</p><p>Rey sprang awake, swearing. Desert curses: the Jedi Order would have been appalled, one and all.</p><p>“You <em>spy</em>!”</p><p>Silence.</p><p>“Don’t you dare just—look down on me from behind that <em>thing</em>,” Rey shouted. Her voice didn’t echo, though. She could have swallowed it back inside. Curse the whole forest, by the Great God! “Don’t you ever take it off?”</p><p>Silence.</p><p>Rey closed her mouth. Babette was nervous, to hear her mistress jolted from sleep in such a fashion. It wouldn’t do to give the mare another excitement, so soon.</p><p>She had fallen asleep before refastening her cuirass. Another trace of a life, gone—sand-heat didn’t fade, fully, after dark. Rey had always hated the weight of wool blankets, in the North, and now in the wild, she hated the weight of armor.</p><p>“You <em>are</em> a spy,” Rey said, more quietly. “But I wouldn’t mind knowing, which way the bridge lies.”</p><p> </p><p>He had a horse. Black; five hands higher than hers. They did not ride, they walked, leading their mounts. The ground was uneven here, along the river’s edge.</p><p>His breath fogged the magicked air. Hers did too, more faintly.  </p><p>Rey was still half-certain that he wanted to kill her. She did not understand why he was <em>waiting</em> to do it. The moonlight would be enough light to show <em>her</em> blood shining on his sword.</p><p>Instead of death, they reached the bridge.</p><p> </p><p>It was a slender thing, but wide enough for a single horse. Rey rode first, shoulders braced for an arrow that never flew.</p><p>On the other side was dawn. The insects whirred. The birds cawed and cackled. Nothing was friendly, gentle, or known.</p><p>The black-iron knight kept pace with her. She was sour with hunger and resignation; he had found her, and would find her again. The ground was still too uncertain for riding.</p><p>“We may as well speak,” said Rey. “So. Answer me this, blackguard.” (She meant that.) “You’ve been in this forest before?”</p><p>He nodded. Before she could chide him for his sullen stillness, he said, “I have.”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“I have ridden round it and through it for a hundred years,” he said. He did not sound as if he was jesting.</p><p>“A hundred!” Perhaps there was only a skeleton under that helm. “Don’t be ridiculous.”</p><p>“You speak as if you do not believe in magic.”</p><p>That quieted her.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>In her dreams, she knows the boy. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>You again, you again, how many worlds and wonders—</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There are not words, for them. They have to breathe their hopes, and mingle their lips until she wakes.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>(She always wakes.)</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p><em>Go to the very heart of the Immortal Trees</em>. <em>There you will find a palace of thorns. Take the Holy Fire—</em></p><p> </p><p>The knight wore armor that daylight does not touch. Rey wore a vial of something poisonous and blue against her breast.</p><p>Perhaps it <em>was</em> unjust of her, to question <em>him</em>.</p><p> </p><p>Three days were gone. Then three more, and then she found she didn’t remember much about counting. The nights were memorable for their unease, for the hulk of him, ten paces off, in the dark.</p><p>Rey’s water ran low. He shared some with her. She hated him, until she was tired of hating him. She prayed on her knees at each, roughly counted noon. He watched her, broad gauntlets resting on his knees, his pauldrons up almost around his ears. Ears that she assumed he still had.</p><p>Though he carried water, he neither ate nor drank in her sight.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Rey has spent her whole life of dreams, wishing that she could speak. That he could answer.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It makes her furious, that glass-darkness; that white face.</em>
</p><p><em>They were meant to know each other. She grips his hands. They make the moon full.</em><br/><br/><br/>“I don't believe you.” Rey sucked at the last of her water. She had been sharing it with Babette; with no thrice-damned river worth trusting, the rations had gone too quickly, even with his help.</p><p>“What?” He was talking more. Maybe people had to speak to each other, here, or go mad.</p><p>“You aren’t a hundred years old.”</p><p>“Maybe not,” he said quietly.</p><p>“So you were lying?”</p><p>“No.” Another heavy pause. His breath gusted out of the farmer’s visor. “I don't know.”</p><p> </p><p>Rey had known witches. Not in the desert; she was alone there, with her dreams. No, Rey had known witches when the Jedi rode out to kill them. She had gone along as a guard; none of the kills had been hers.</p><p>Once, she had seen...wings.</p><p><em>It was a fairy!</em> she had cried, anguished. Her fellow knights shook their heads.</p><p>
  <em>There is no such thing.</em>
</p><p> </p><p><em>Go to the very heart of the Immortal Trees</em>. <em>There you will find a palace of thorns. Take the Holy Fire, and burn the thorns to ashes.</em></p><p>Not for the first time, Rey wondered if she was being sent to kill something more than brambles.</p><p> </p><p>The moon rose every night. Her dreams were stronger, and they lasted a long time. The Tico sisters used to say she muttered incantations in her sleep. Yet, no one had thought <em>her </em>to be a witch. Rey wondered if the women the Jedi killed, muttering over their cauldrons and walking with their heads spun round the wrong way, rumored to be devourers of lost children—</p><p>Rey wondered if they had ever been young.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>She can’t speak in her dreams, but she can feel, and think, and remember. The whole world beside them seems colorless. She’s known him before, and it wasn’t always like this.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They aren’t—weren’t—shouldn’t be always afraid.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>She was going to ask him his name, that day. Traveling companions should know <em>something</em> about each other, and since he would not remove his armor or armet, even when he was in a talkative mood, Rey had to wonder if there was <em>anything</em> about him that was not a secret.</p><p>Perhaps if he told her his name, she would be able to tell <em>him</em> the truth about the hundred years.</p><p>His voice, hard to discern as it was beneath the plates of iron, was not a terribly old voice.</p><p>She was going to ask him, but the forest changed. It had a habit of doing that, behind one’s back. The insects and birds were different colors, at first; then there were none at all. And Rey and the black knight were walking, riding, stumbling over the serpent-roots of the Immortal Trees—</p><p>—Rey was trying to remember if the trees were holy—</p><p>And then all at once the trees fell away, and their world did too.</p><p>At least, so it seemed to a girl whose life always changed in brief, heart-charged moments. The moments tricked one as well as any sweet, poison river could.</p><p>The moments made time seem simple.</p><p> </p><p>Rey looked out at the brambles, and her first thought (an unholy one) was that they were beautiful. There were no seasons in this part of the world, and certainly no seasons in the forest, but the brambles were thick and laden with roses redder than anything else in the world—</p><p>—save blood.</p><p> </p><p>The black knight had never seen the Holy Fire. Rey had spoken with him somewhat openly, and he had seen her complete the Jedi rituals and prayers, but she had never shown him <em>that</em>.</p><p>She felt it growing warmer against her skin, concealed in its little vial. Such warmth was hungry, frightening.</p><p>She had thought it <em>poisonous</em>, when no one was nearby to hear the thought.</p><p> </p><p>In a strained voice, the black knight said, “Who are you?”</p><p>Rey turned sharply. Babette shuddered. “What?”</p><p>“I said…” He sighed. “What are you going to do?”</p><p>“I...” Rey knew what she was <em>meant</em> to do. All the years of her life, the Jedi had taught her not to give way to impulse, to the knocking of her heart. Lady Leia, bearing griefs that no one spoke of, had been different, but Rey had known that she would not be with the Order always. She was the last remnant of the royal family, along with Master Luke.</p><p>It had been theirs to diminish, childless as they were.</p><p>Strange to think that they, as twins, had once represented an abundance of life.</p><p>Rey breathed quickly, too hot in the cool, indifferent air. It wasn’t the wind that was watching; it was the roses. The black knight, shifting in his saddle, asked again,</p><p>“What are you going to do?”</p><p><em>Go to the very heart of the Immortal Trees</em>. <em>There you will find a palace of thorns. Take the Holy Fire, and burn the thorns to ashes. Whatever you do, do not touch them.</em></p><p>Rey dismounted. Babette whickered softly, then lowered her head to pluck at the fragrant grass flowing at their feet.</p><p>Yes; between the brambles and the spires of the trees, there was grass.</p><p>Rey unsheathed her sword. She heard the black knight slip down from his steed with a crash. Too much armor. She had teased him about it just yesterday.</p><p>The roses were crimson, and Rey’s dreams had little color, yet she felt herself flooded by him—the boy.</p><p>She took her first steps.</p><p>The brambles trembled, coiled, opened.</p><p> </p><p><em>Do you belong to an order? </em>Rey had asked. <em>That armor looks particular.</em></p><p>The black knight tapped a metal-cased finger against a metal-cased knee.</p><p>
  <em>No. I belong to no one.</em>
</p><p>She had been certain, for the first time, that he was really lying.</p><p>Strangely, it had made her feel pity, rather than fear.</p><p> </p><p>She did not touch the brambles. Was that not the letter of the law dictated to her? She had her heart full of the yearning, white-faced boy; her lungs full of the dangerous sweetness of the roses she had been sent to destroy.</p><p>“Have a care,” said the black knight.</p><p>There was something quite human about his voice, just then, as if she’d surprised him.</p><p>Rey turned back to look at him. She saw light fall on his shadow-clad form, and she watched it disappear. He was outside of the thorns that hovered all around her, but both of them were caged.</p><p>“I think,” Rey said, without knowing why she said it, “That there is something I must do.”</p><p>The roses drooped with the weight of their own beauty. Rey followed the path that opened before her, and closed behind her as the thorns wove their impenetrable wall again.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Lady Leia was a widow.</p><p>Rey was an orphan, so it was only natural (by the reckoning of some) that they should be close. The high-blooded families who sent their most prized sons and daughters to fight within the Jedi Order doubtless felt it unfair that a desert rat snatched from among sun-bleached bones and shifting sands should be elevated to a favorite’s position.</p><p>No one dared question a member of the royal line, and Rey was permitted to see her whenever the Lady wished.</p><p>Both Luke and Leia had been disarming and even warm, when gotten alone. They had shared so much—joy and love and secret sorrow—that Rey often felt that she was reading the pages of a book she had only just mastered, and which was underwritten by a language she did not know.</p><p>Lady Leia had had a husband, once.</p><p>When the Jedi-ordered wars went ill in the east, she retreated west to wait.</p><p>Wait for what?</p><p>Rey hadn’t had a chance to ask her that.</p><p>Rey had no memories of her parents, no real understanding of how she had learned to survive (sheer spite, and the fickle but clever sand-people had helped), and no distrust of dreams that others might have questioned.</p><p> </p><p>Rey, a dozen years after her second beginning, was climbing through thorns that seemed to recognize her.</p><p>There were six hundred marble steps (she counted). She thought distractedly of Babette, whom she had left cropping the grass, and she thought of the black knight, who had spoken as if he feared for her. At the end of the steps was a door. Rey turned slowly, that she might see the way from which she had come: there were turrets, maybe, and walls and balustrades, but all were made invisible by the living shadow of the roses and their cruel spines.</p><p>Only the door and the steps nearest to her were bared.</p><p> </p><p>Rey prayed, without really believing she had a right to. Then she set her hand on the frigid iron ring, piercing deep into the ancient wood, and pulled with all her might.</p><p>The force that thrust her backwards was no magical force; it was the ordinary consequence of seizing at an object which gave more easily than expected. Rey stumbled to her feet, groaning. Her armor had gifted her a few bruises, perhaps…but it was her hand that made her gasp.</p><p>Driven through the palm was a single thorn.</p><p> </p><p>On the other side of the door, her hand fisted against her breast as if keeping it close to her would staunch the bleeding, Rey climbed. Here were more steps, but these were neither broad nor marble. They were narrow and crooked and winding.</p><p>She had disobeyed the principles of her order. She knew that.</p><p>Still, the sand-rat prayed.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Once, the boy sat on the edge of a half-sketched shore. Rey sat beside him. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Like this, they are able to breathe together, even if they cannot sleep.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In profile, she examines the bones of him. The world is lines and angles and savage emptiness. The water rises, and yet hangs suspended, slashing misshapen shadows across his cheeks.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>The second door, the one above the winding stair, crumbled when she rested her uninjured hand against it. Rey knew magic when she saw it.</p><p>She held her breath.</p><p>(The Holy Fire had not been released by her fall.)</p><p>There were no thorns here. The dust was thick like autumn leaves upon the floorboards. Rey’s boots trod heavily. She made for the bier at the room’s center. She could see that it was a bier because light fell from an arrow slot high up, and because a man lay sleeping on it.</p><p>He was very tall.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Rey knows that if she tells anyone about the dreams, they shall think her mad, or wicked—or worst of all, they shall think her lonely. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>She wishes she could tell the boy that she knows him to be real.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>“<em>You</em>,” Rey whispered, to the man on the bier.</p><p>He did not stir, her boy. The waking world had given them—this—age and wisdom, sorrow and magic, and now, the power to speak.</p><p>But he could not hear her.</p><p> </p><p>Then the dragon came.</p><p> </p><p>It came like an ocean-roar, and a thunderbolt, and the Holy Fire flared so bright and sharp against Rey’s breast that she fell to the shuddering floorboards, crying out and clawing at her cuirass.</p><p>She did not know it was a dragon yet, of course. Such knowledge came when she had flung her sacred weapon across the room, and when the monster tore the roof of the turret clean off.</p><p> </p><p>Rey had loved:</p><p>Lady Leia. Swordmaster Luke. The Tico sisters. The doll she had made of scraps scavenged from sand.</p><p>
  <em>The boy.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>Rey gave no more thought to the Holy Fire. She was angry, more than she was afraid. The Jedi had sent her here, under the pretense of the Great God’s will, and told her to burn down the favorite of her own heart. The thorns were not her friends, but they had parted for her. The Jedi had not even told her the <em>truth</em>.</p><p>The dragon was black-shimmering, with pearly claws and teeth and milk-white eyes. It breathed fire the color of blood.</p><p>Rey stood between it and the bier. She meant to cast the words of her Order into its maw, but she knew she no longer had a right to them, just as she had no right to prayers. Instead, she shouted,</p><p>“Not him!”</p><p>The dragon pitched its head up and hurled flame into the sky. It did not touch<em> her</em>. Its black scales, heaving over cunning, twisted sinews shone, yes, but in shining it seemed to swallow light.</p><p>Rey wished that the black knight could help her now. He had been a friend, after all. He had been odd and taciturn and halfway mad, but he had not hurt her, and…</p><p>She did not think he had ever lied to her without her knowing.</p><p>Rey shut her eyes. Here was the forest and the blood-roses, here was the river and its captured moonbeams. Here was the figure standing over her, and here was the boy, and the sand-rat who loved him—</p><p>Rey threw the blade her saviors had given her away.</p><p>As she had begged, and hoped, and even supplicated, it struck the vial of Holy Fire with its tooth-sharp tip.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Take the Holy Fire, and burn the thorns to ashes.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>She had done something, at least.</p><p> </p><p>Blue vaulted over black, heat climbed to fever pitch. Rey covered her face in her hands, but the gauntlets steamed and she writhed away, screaming. The whole world burned, and Rey and the boy burned with it.</p><p> </p><p>(But it was not the end.)</p><p> </p><p>The new world was not gentle.</p><p>(<em>I’m not looking for gentle things</em>.)</p><p>Rey opened her eyes, and shut them again. There was a smell of burning hanging in the air, but it was like woodsmoke, like sweet pine. Something fragrant and good. She dragged her hand over her face; her palm was still tacky with blood.</p><p>This was the same body, then. The same life.</p><p>She stumbled to her feet, trying to see shapes among other shapes of whiteness. When she walked, her boot struck something hard. When the blur in her eyes faded, and the smoke faded too, she saw what it was.</p><p>A suit of black armor, crumpled amidst a heap of feathered ash.</p><p>Its loss struck at her; stabbed at her. Forgetting, again, she rested her wounded hand against her lips. But before she could grieve—</p><p>“You.”</p><p> </p><p>The boy—the man—rose of his own accord. His armor was silver, burnished, and showing its fine make all the better as age diminished from its surface.</p><p>Rey did not think long about such magic.</p><p>“You,” she said.</p><p>“Yes,” he answered. “Rey.”</p><p>“You know my name?”</p><p>His mobile face, aching in its irregular beauty, framed in waves of jet-black hair, was alight with love for her.</p><p>Love was the only word that came close.</p><p>“I know everything about you,” he said, and as he spoke he unfastened his gauntlet and the armpiece above.</p><p> </p><p>No one had ever been able to tell her to what or to whom the half-moon belonged.</p><p> </p><p>In later years, a tale will be told, about a sleeping princess made so by jealousy and hatred. In this tale, a prince shall come from a far-off land, and according to some, he must slay a dragon before he can wake her with a kiss.</p><p>Rey of the Jedi, Rey of the sands, lived the whole of this in a manner turned upside down. She set out to destroy a threat to all free peoples. She did not know that Kylo Ren, ghost knight of the Sith Order, was sent to kill <em>her. </em>She was to lay waste to the thorn-kingdom by means of Holy Fire, and he was meant to follow her to the bier on which another body lay. She was to touch nothing; he was to touch only her, in his dragon-form, with blistering death.</p><p>(Only then, could she have become a Swordmaster.)</p><p>(Only then, could the plans of Evil been made whole, with the body of Ben Solo woken and corrupted by a sacrifice of blood.)</p><p>Why he spared her life until the end, and why she thought of him as a friend almost at the beginning; why she climbed the six-hundred-and-twenty steps alone and protected the boy she found there without even knowing who he was—</p><p>All these questions can only be answered by the one part of the new tale that is wholly true:</p><p> </p><p>Their kiss.</p><p> </p><p>The memory of their kiss has lasted far, far longer than a hundred years.</p>
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